1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates, in general, to amusement park rides and other entertainment rides such as round iron rides, and, more particularly, to vehicle and amusement or theme park rides configured to provide passengers with ride experiences simulating free flight or relatively unrestrained flying experience such as, but not limited to, the passengers being placed in a prone or face-down position (e.g., inclined at least partially forward from vertical during a portion of the ride).
2. Relevant Background
Amusement and theme parks are popular worldwide with hundreds of millions of people visiting the parks each year. Park operators continuously seek new designs for rides that attract and continue to entertain guests. Many parks include round iron rides that include vehicles or gondolas mounted on support arms extending outward from a centrally located drive or rotation assembly. The guests sit in the vehicles and are rotated in a circle about the drive assembly, which spins about its central axis. In some of these rides, the guests may operate an interactive device, such as a joystick in the vehicle, to make the support arm and their attached vehicle lift upward and, later, drop back downward.
While these rides are often very popular with younger children, these rides are typically not considered a thrill ride for the older guests as the rides often rotate at less than 10 revolutions per minute (RPM). When designing new rides, park operators have a great amount of freedom to develop thrill rides with very different configurations such as roller coasters and the like that allow the guests to travel at high speeds and experience high accelerations as their vehicles travel around corners and dips. However, park operators face a different challenge when they attempt to refurbish or modify an existing round iron ride to create a ride that will attract older guests but that yet can be provided in the same space constraints or have the same footprint, i.e., a ride provided within the same circular area used by the original round iron ride. Even more attractive to the park operator would be a ride configuration that made use of at least some of the original ride components such as the circular drive assembly as this significantly reduces start up costs and allows continued use of a proven drive system. However, the relatively low rotation rate of the drive assembly and fixed seating orientation of the guest has been a significant barrier to the amount of thrill or excitement that could be provided with a ride based on a round iron ride design.